


You can be whatever you want

by irisdouglasiana



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-29
Updated: 2017-06-29
Packaged: 2018-11-20 19:27:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11341785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisdouglasiana/pseuds/irisdouglasiana
Summary: The name is her agent’s creation, but Whitney Frost fills in the details on her own.





	You can be whatever you want

**Author's Note:**

> tw: domestic violence, general violence. Proceed accordingly.

In Oklahoma, sometimes the tornado arrives from out of nowhere. One moment, the sky is perfectly clear, in the next, the wind picks up and the black clouds come rolling in and somewhere far away, you hear the rumble of thunder—until suddenly it’s not so far away after all. When the storm gets close, Agnes’s mother grabs her arm and pulls her into the cellar. In the dim smoky light from the gas lamps, Bud sits on a shabby chair—everyone else sits on overturned crates—and drinks himself into oblivion. If they’re lucky, he’ll fall asleep. If they aren’t, he’ll turn on them in a rage, shoving Wilma down and calling her _whore_ while she screams  _you go to hell_ and then _I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry_. Worst of all is when the alcohol makes him melancholy: he’ll burst into tears and moan incoherently about his mother, who was an angel, and Wilma will put her arms around him and rock him back and forth.

And Agnes sits in the shadows and watches and hates him, and hates her, and waits for the tornado to swallow all of them whole.

* * *

Agnes’s mother kicks her out just after her eighteenth birthday— _useless_ — _ungrateful_ — _selfish little brat_ —but she had already been planning to run away and had saved up nearly enough money, so it almost comes as a relief. She takes the train out of Broxton and doesn’t look back; feels no trace of sadness or homesickness as the train chugs past wilting corn fields and tiny towns and migrant worker encampments. There are beggars at every station, those thin ghosts of men and women and their dirty barefoot children, and she is glad to leave them in the dust behind her.

When she arrives at the depot in Oklahoma City, she sits alone and stares at the map for a long time, even though she had been dreaming of this day for years and had come up with various detailed plans about where she would go and what she would do. But it's one thing to dream, and another thing entirely to close your eyes and jump. She had decided long ago on New York, but when it’s her turn in line, she changes her mind and purchases a ticket for Los Angeles instead. (Had she gone east as planned, her story might have turned out to be very different indeed—but how was she to know that?)

The whistle sounds, the engine roars, and the train picks up speed; chasing the sun west, taking Agnes Cully to her destiny.

* * *

The name is her new agent’s creation, but she fills in the details on her own. Whitney Frost is from New York City; her father made his money in railroads, though he was no Carnegie or Rockefeller. Her mother was beautiful and refined and died at a tragically young age, so her father showered his only child with affection and paid careful attention to her education: no half-siblings to fight with over hand-me-downs and broken pencils. Whitney Frost grew up in a spacious apartment with maids and ate strawberries and cream off of expensive china. She never went to bed hungry. No one ever called her trash.

Agnes Cully? She was nobody. But Whitney Frost could be whatever she wanted.

* * *

She receives a letter from her mother a year or so after she became a household name, sent to the address she uses for fan mail. It’s full of spelling and grammatical errors—Wilma was only ever semi-literate and had never found much need for improvement—and it is addressed to _Aggie_ : she saw her in that picture, the one with the four sisters; couldn’t believe her baby was a movie star…her half-sister had run off with some ne’er-do-well…half-brother hurt his head in a construction accident and couldn’t work…own health not so good, weak lungs and stomach troubles…roof had collapsed over the kitchen and needed money for repairs…could Agnes maybe…

Nowhere in the letter does her mother ever say _sorry_. She tears it up into dozens of pieces and flushes the paper down the toilet. She does the same when another one arrives a couple weeks later, and another one after that, and another one after that. The letters finally stop coming about eight months later. She doesn’t inquire further.

* * *

She is sitting in the kitchen and watching Joseph make dinner for her when she asks him about the first time he had killed a man. She expects him to embellish and boast as he normally does, but to her surprise, he is silent for a long moment, stirring the marinara sauce with his back turned to her.

I was fourteen, he says at last. Ray Colombo. Few years older than Joseph; ran with the same crew. He looked up to Ray like the big brother he never had. But then he’d become an informant—at least, that was what they told him. He put a bag over Ray’s head and helped drag him down to the basement, where they beat him and kicked him until finally the boss placed a gun in Joseph’s hand. The worst part was that he knew Ray’s whole family; his pops was a mean old bastard but his ma was nice and so were his sisters. He felt a little bad about it afterwards, whenever he saw them at church or at the store. But Ray should’ve thought of them before he became a rat, Joseph says with a shrug.

She doesn’t think about that story again until years after she had broken it off with Joseph, when she decides that Jane Scott has to die. And when she takes the situation into her own hands—Calvin is worse than useless; he turns white and nearly faints and she thinks he might turn them both in—it is difficult, to be sure, but not as difficult as she though it would be. After the first, it becomes easier and easier.

* * *

She barely manages to drive herself home after the explosion at Isodyne, gripping the steering wheel so tightly her hands start to cramp, leaning out the window at a stoplight to vomit up something dark and sticky. After she pulls in to the driveway, she sits there in the dark for a full hour until she can get the shaking under control and the strange burning sensation on her forehead begins to subside.

Calvin is already up when she slips inside. He’s talking frantically on the phone with someone from the Council about the explosion and _how will this affect the campaign_ and he barely spares her a glance as she ducks into the bedroom. She knows something is _happening_ to her and she can’t stop it, but the wheels in her head are beginning to turn, replaying the accident step by step. She writes it all down and in the morning she places an order for a dozen lab rats. This will require careful study.

* * *

Her husband is afraid of her. She can hear Cal’s heart rate jump and his breathing turn shallow when she walks in the room; she can smell his sweat as the adrenaline kicks in. He pays attention to her every move. He listens carefully to everything she has to say. He does what she tells him to do. It makes her feel good. Better than she ever has.

He doesn’t get it, of course, and neither does that irritating Agent Carter with her suggestion that they can “fix” her—who asked her to meddle anyway?—but it hardly matters. What matters is that they get the uranium. What matters is that her research can continue unhindered. Any obstacles will be removed.

And when Calvin himself becomes an obstacle, it’s unfortunate, but he made his choice, didn’t he? He should have thought about the consequences before he decided to betray her. After she concludes the meeting, she returns to the fundraiser with Hugh Jones and Mortimer Hayes trailing behind her with anxious smiles and takes a turn dancing with each of them just to see them sweat. All these powerful buffoons at her feet! She downs two glasses of wine and eats an entire tray of hors d’oeuvres just because she can. She finds it all so funny that she suddenly starts laughing, and the two men glance at each other and nervously laugh along with her. She laughs even harder.

* * *

There’s no reason why her plan shouldn’t work, despite the initial failure and her frustrations with the experiments involving Wilkes. She triple-checked the calculations and she knows her math is perfect. She will open up the Rift once more, and surely this time it will take her.

Except it doesn’t.

* * *

you can be whatever you want youcanbewhateveryouwant you can be

            whatever you want

                          whatever

                                         you

                                                want.

* * *

She had been ten years old when the kitchen clock broke. She took it apart and tried to put it back together and found that she couldn’t fix it; the cogs and springs were old and brittle and they snapped in her hands. So in her anger, she scooped up all the pieces and went out to the porch and threw them into the field as far as she could. Then she forgot them.

She left Oklahoma and never came back. She became wealthy and famous beyond her wildest dreams. She got everything she wanted. And the pieces of the clock lay quietly in the field, rusting under layers of snow and dirt, until finally, the skies turned dark and the earth trembled and the tornado carried all of them away, one by one.


End file.
